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Friday, September 6, 2013

"Sister Emily's Lightship" by Jane Yolen from Sister Emily's Lightship and Other Stories

This first appeared in Patrick Nielsen Hayden's Starlight, and won a Nebula award.
Employing many of Emily Dickinson's lines along the way, Yolen tells of Dickinson's life and afterlife. Dickinson has these attacks of light that blinds and causes her to faint. She fears her father will send her away. But the roof blows and she's taken into the sky to meet a different kind of maker--a traveler.

"She had already dwelt in that greatest of possibilities for an hour.... The universe was hers, no matter that she only lived in one tiny world."